T. Buckingham Thomas: Home Page

The four-games-out-of-seven NBA playoff series between the Celtics and the Cavaliers is tied at two games apiece. Game 5 will be tonight, and either the Celts or the Cavs could win. However, a radio commentator today referred to league history, and he said that the outcome of Game 5 is critical. For some reason, whoever wins Game 5 goes on to win the series 85% of the time!

Are incomprehensible forces at work? Is there something magic about Game 5 that makes it the key to victory?

No, that 85% figure seems perfectly reasonable to me. Let's look at the probabilities going into Game 5. With four games played so far, the series standings could be either 4-0, 3-1, or 2-2.

Suppose a dozen different series reach Game 5. In roughly six of them, one team will be leading 3-1 (Scenario B1 or B2), while the other six will be tied (Scenario C). If Scenarios B1 and B2 are equally likely (3 times each), we can average the probabilities to (3x100% + 3x25% + 6x75%) / 12 = 69%.

But when a series stands at 3-1, which team is more likely to win Game 5? The superior team, the one that already has three wins, correct? So the series-clinching Scenario B1 occurs more often than the delaying-the-inevitable Scenario B2. If it occurs five times out of six, the averages are now (5x100% + 1x25% + 6x75%) / 12 = 81%.

Now consider other subtle effects such as morale and momentum, plus the fact that the winner of Game 5 gets to return to that same favorable arena for the decisive Game 7, and we can easily justify the 85% result that was obtained experimentally.

The cost of sending an ounce of first-class mail went up by a penny today, but for the first time I didn't have to worry about coping with the increase. The Post Office finally figured out an efficient way to sell stamps, 160 years after the first stamps were issued in 1847.

“Until then,” wrote John Ross in Smithsonian ten years ago, “the federal postal system had operated without stamps. Mail usually traveled postage due. To claim a letter, the addressee, rather than the addressor, paid its postage. (A prepaid letter might have suggested an insult, that the recipient was too poor to pay for it himself. But ‘paying for a letter was like receiving a collect call from China.’ In the 1830s one disgruntled individual harassed an enemy by sending him letters stuffed with blank pages. Many people who received mail simply refused to pay, rejecting the letter outright.) Stamps promised to flip this tradition on its head by shifting responsibility for paying postage from the recipient to the letter writer.”

However, a problem arose when inflation required an increase in postal rates. Your five-cent stamps were no longer sufficient. You had to add a one-cent stamp, as on this 1968 letter, and buy six-cent stamps for future mailings.

Last year, the Post Office at last introduced the Forever Stamp. You buy it at whatever rate is current, and it can be used on first-class mail at any time, regardless of any price increases in the interim. The fee that long ago was collected when the mail was delivered, and later was collected when the mail was sent, is now collected when the stamp is purchased. It seems like a good idea to me.

I had another idea around 1970, inspired by the IBM computer cards of that era with which we fed Fortran programs and data into a mainframe computer. The cards all had one corner shaved off so that they could be mechanically sorted to face the same direction.

My idea was that the Post Office should give a discount to standard-sized envelopes if they were shaped like trapezoids so they could all be mechanically sorted to face the same direction. But optical recognition techniques have made these non-rectangular envelopes unnecessary, I guess.

I switched on the radio the other day and heard an orchestra playing a sophisticated fugue. That's unusual, I thought. Perhaps the composer is imitating J.S. Bach. Then the chorale melody “Wachet auf” entered, and the piece built to an inspiring climax. “I must be listening to Mendelssohn,” I thought. “I'm reminded of the sound of his Reformation Symphony, and he was a big fan of Bach.” Mendelssohn famously conducted a performance in which he revived Bach's neglected St. Matthew Passion a century after it was written.

The announcer came on afterwards and identified the work as the overture to Mendelssohn's oratorio Paulus. I was right.

But I've barely heard of that oratorio. Looking for more information online, I found a quote from Thomas Norrington in The Guardian: “My guess is that the piece that familiarised audiences with Bach was Mendelssohn's Paulus. It was performed 300 times in its first year, all over, from Manchester to Cologne to America. It's got chorales all the way through and people said, ‘What's that?’ and Mendelssohn said, ‘It's Bach.’” Tim Ashley adds, “Paulus is now rarely performed and is, perhaps, now very much a lost work in need of rediscovery as the St Matthew Passion once was.”

MAY 5, 2008 THE PENNSYLVANIA CANAL

In New Orleans, Canal Street leads down to the river. But in Pittsburgh, Canal Street runs parallel to the river. It's hard to believe that people would go to the trouble of building an artificial waterway alongside a natural waterway that already existed. But they did. It was part of the Main Line nearly two centuries ago, as I explain in a new article.

I've added a new article with some ancient words from someone I'm calling Solomon Redner. In his dark vision, there is nothing new under the sun.

Here's a way for hotels to increase occupancy rates. They could convert some of their bedrooms into screening rooms.

I've sketched out the idea on an Embassy Suites floor plan. I've replaced the bed and dresser with a big plasma TV screen (red) and nine chairs (aqua), along with surround sound speakers, a Blu-ray disc player, and high-def service from cable or satellite.

The former bedroom now resembles a high-end home theater, offering something bigger and better than the TV sets most people have in their own houses.

The other spaces retain their functions as bathroom, kitchen, and living room. The sofa opens out into a bed, so the suite can still be considered a hotel suite.

A group of local people could rent the suite for a get-together, splitting the cost several ways, or a larger group could rent several adjacent suites and have a big party. In the kitchen they could prepare snacks, or they could order room service. On the big screen they could watch the big game or a couple of movies they've brought with them. At other times they could gather in the living room to chat. I don't think the hotel could be accused of charging admission to watch the game; rather, they're simply renting rooms that happen to have better amenities than most.

APRIL 21, 2008
THE OLD SWIMMIN' HOLE

When I was in sixth grade in Richwood, Ohio, 49 springs ago, our teacher John Merriman took us on a picnic at the end of the school year. The more adventurous kids brought their swim trunks. I brought my camera.

That teacher, I learned last month, is still teaching, coaching tennis at nearby Marysville High School!

You can learn more about Mr. Merriman in my new article of that name, which also gives me an excuse to show the photos from that 1959 picnic.

In the first of the seven episodes, the title character gave a speech from the pulpit of a Boston church, after which everybody sang a patriotic hymn with these unusual words:

Let tyrants shake their iron rod
And Slav'ry clank her galling chains.
We fear them not. We trust in God.
New England's God forever reigns!

I recognized this as the then-famous tune "Chester" by William Billings. But many of the other historical details go by so fast, even in an 8½-hour miniseries, that it's hard to catch them all.

For example, in this week's installment, Adams as President attends a play in Philadelphia. As he enters the Presidential box, an actor is onstage declaiming the play's prologue, which I guessed was Shakespearean.

Exult, each patriot heart! This night is shown
A piece which we may fairly call our own.

However, when I Googled the text later, I found it was the prologue to The Contrast, the first successful "piece" for the theater to be written by an American playwright. The author was Royall Tyler. And we met Tyler earlier in the miniseries as an unsuccessful suitor for Adams' daughter Nabby!

I'm not sure, but I suspect that Tyler is the one depicted here speaking the prologue. Seeing Adams in the box, he calls out, "Three cheers for our President! May he, like Samson, slay thousands of Frenchmen with the jawbone of a Jefferson!" Adams gives a shocked little gasp at this disrespectful reference to his rival. But then Tyler patriotically begins singing the national anthem, and the whole audience joins in the chorus.

It's not "The Star-Spangled Banner," which would not be written for another 15 years or so. Rather, it's "Hail, Columbia." This tune, originally composed for George Washington's inauguration, gained words during the Adams administration and was the unofficial anthem for most of the 19th century.

Behold the chief, who now commands,
Once more to serve his country stands!
The rock on which the storm will break;
The rock on which the storm will break.
But, armed in virtue firm and true,
His hopes are fixed on Heav'n and you.
When hope was sinking in dismay,
When glooms obscured Columbia's day,
His steady mind, from changes free,
Resolved on death or liberty.

Firm, united let us be,
Rallying round our liberty!
As a band of brothers joined,
Peace and safety we shall find.

Notice the phrase "band of brothers." That was the title of another HBO series also co-produced by Tom Hanks, although the phrase originally comes from Shakespeare's Henry V.

Also note that "joined" and "find" apparently are supposed to rhyme. I've sometimes seen the former word in an old phonetic spelling as "jined," and I suspect that it was pronounced that way then.

And one final detail that caught my attention this week was the final scene.

Adams, declining to attend the inauguration of his successor Jefferson, heads back home to Massachusetts, once more a private citizen. He walks out the front door of the still-unfinished White House and gets on a bus.

As the National Hockey League playoffs begin, here's a little article reminiscing about radio's Earl Bugaile and my attempt to interview a Penguins coach.

The board was discussing this article. A psychological study of college students has come to the (unsurprising) conclusion that women are better than men at interpreting non-verbal cues. Excerpts from the article:

One contributor to the board actually read the study and found it unconvincing. It ignores such signals such as gestures or voice pitch or physical proximity, merely asking its participants to evaluate photos. He notes that "37.1% of men and 31.9% of women identified certain photos and thought 'friendly' instead of 'interested.' When that large of a percentage in both genders is missing the cues, well, maybe there aren't any cues. The methodology is pretty tortured, too. There are so many variables that, if you did it with a whole different group of people, you'd probably arrive at a different conclusion."

My impression is that many psychological studies are similarly half-baked. They use an unrepresentative sample (easy-to-obtain college undergraduates) and simple tests (easy-to-arrange photo identification), then attempt to extrapolate the limited results into sweeping conclusions.

But regardless of the quality of the experimental data, we can always find anecdotal evidence to support the conclusion — such as my contribution to the board, quoted above. Several others agreed with me. One wrote: "I'll give you that 'Amen' you're looking for, sir. I wouldn't know flirting if there was a Sprockets-esque announcement — Now is the time when we flirt."